Being online kinda sucks. Algorithms maximize our attention and polarize us. News
has to be fact-checked. Who do we trust? Connection tech is making us lonelier than ever. Kids don’t know how to talk in person, much less date. We lash out, troll, and bully. AI is making all of this worse. These companies are some of the biggest in the world, with short-term profit momentum that makes turning the ship seemingly impossible (though none seem to be trying anyway). Yet we’re addicted. Not just because we’re hacking our brains with red notification badges and variable rewards, but because there’s sooo much good, and even more potential.
The majority of our online infrastructure maximizes attention like McDonald’s (not healthy individually or sustainable collectively), and most alternatives that currently exist are like Michelin Star restaurants (not scalable); UpTrust is the Chipotle of media (healthy, sustainable and scalable).
But how? Why can we do what Facebook can’t? Why do we think they haven’t tried our innovations? What’s upstream of our innovations?
A. Understanding how self-organizing systems work, how to guide them, and what doesn’t work, both inside the systems we create (eg prioritizing rewarding trusty content with views) and outside (eg business processes and profit pressures).
B. Understanding hyperobjects: engineering is necessary but insufficient for a social, psychological, and technical-systemic problem.
C. We’re uniquely experienced in facilitating conscious dialogue, and uniquely capable of holding a complex balance of paradoxes like idealism and pragmatism.
D. Our meaning making maturity: This is sort of a meta-category that includes all of the above, but I think it’s worth making explicit, because then it can be challenged and refined. We believe the meaning-making maturity needed for solving this problem is part of why there will be low hanging fruits
in this direction: They’re only low-hanging when you have eyes to see, and these eyes are developmentally rare. Those who can apply such thinking here (versus in personal/spiritual development) are an even smaller subset.